Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys are in the coveted position of being able to fill dancehalls in Louisiana, sell out performance venues around the world, and remain the vanguard of innovation in the music of their culture. Beginning in 1988 and buoyed by the enthusiasm of academic folklorists, they made their debut on folk festival stages the world over and earned a solid reputation as virtuosic, committed yet creative exponents of the treasures that their mentors had handed to them. Musical heroes like Dewey Balfa, Aldus Roger and Belton Richard are not just names on a record cover to this band. They were teachers, band mates and friends.
One of the traits of the Cajun culture that has enabled it to survive in an ocean of pop sensibilities is its resistance to change. From the beginning the Mamou Playboys have engaged this tough audience in a dramatic dialogue over new ideas. Always thirsty for challenges and never afraid of a struggle, the Playboys have not left their first audience behind, but have won them over and brought them along on their adventures. The jury is in, and you can find it anywhere this band plays, at any dancehall they choose, packing the floor and literally shaking the entire building to their seductive rhythm . The result is a new Cajun music that is completely connected with who they are, where they live, and all the history, language and DNA that put them there.
Their eighth release opens a new window in the world of the 21st century Cajun. "Happytown," on Rounder Records, folds time in on itself, examining the emotions of creole slave poetry with burly, serpentine electric guitar, tightly interlaced fiddles that sigh as if inches away from the ear, drum loops and digital samples of black juré singing from the thirties, and the fever of full bore diatonic accordion revelry. It has acoustic recordings made on the banks of the Atchafalaya Swamp as well as lyrics that visit the tenderness of forbidden love and the brutality of a midnight fistfight, all in Cajun French. This recording takes the band beyond the realm of the mimics of old records, beyond hyphenating hybrids of ethnic fill-in-the-blank/rock, into a new world of true expression that carries their tribal memory through today and into the future.
Louisiana's rich cultural history helps to explain the Playboys. The Acadians (seventeenth century French settlers in the New World) were deported from what is now Nova Scotia in 1755. Overcoming great hardship, many of them eventually found refuge in the bayous and prairies of Louisiana. Since that time, their culture has flourished, becoming "Cajun" as it absorbed influences from Afro-Caribbean, German, Native American, and even Scots-Irish neighbors. This mixture is nowhere more apparent than in the music. Twentieth century Americana has brought powerful pressures to assimilate, but somehow South Louisiana continues to incorporate influences without losing its unique identity. More recently Cajun musicians have yielded to the pleasures of zydeco, the music of their French-speaking black creole neighbors, and have also created a unique genre of rock and roll known as swamp pop.
The Mamou Playboys have a compulsion for variety. This is enabled and abetted by the wealth of musical styles that Southwest Louisiana has to offer. They can take an audience on a long and fulfilling journey. Steve Riley makes his circuit through three different accordions, fiddle, vocals, guitar and bass. David Greely may explore the trials of the previous century or the joys of last Saturday night in his songs and bring them to life on fiddle, tenor sax, or guitar. Guitarist Sam Broussard, the newest member of the group, is a luxury cruise unto himself, with soaring vocal harmonies and completely unbounded Telecaster expeditions. Kevin Dugas' percussion and Blaine Gaspard's electric bass stoke the boilers and make it all go effortlessly. There is so much musical wealth here and there are so many stories to tell. They can't and they won't play the same thing all night.
All these flavors included in one Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys concert silence the skeptics who think it "all sounds the same." This band is from Louisiana's Gulf Coast, South of the American South, and it is brimful of sounds as compelling, diverse and exotic as one evening of music can possibly hold.
